Sacramental Shopping

Louisa May Alcott, Edith Wharton, and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism

Sarah Way Sherman

Publication Year: 2013

Written a generation apart and rarely treated together by scholars, Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (1868) and Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth (1905) share a deep concern with materialism, moral development, and self-construction. The heroines in both grapple with conspicuous consumption, an aspect of modernity that challenges older beliefs about ethical behavior and core identity.

Placing both novels at the historical intersection of modern consumer culture and older religious discourses on materialism and identity, Sarah Way Sherman analyzes how Alcott and Wharton rework traditional Protestant discourses to interpret their heroines' struggle with modern consumerism. Her conclusion reveals how Little Women's optimism, still buoyed by otherworldly justice, providential interventions, and the notion of essential identity, ultimately gives way to the much darker vision of modern materialistic culture in The House of Mirth.

Cover

Title Page, Copyright Page

Contents

Acknowledgments

...sustainability. Lisa MacFarlane, Tom Newkirk, Ruth Sample, Diane Freedman,
David Watters, and Michael Ferber were an enthusiastic audience for my ideas;
they never seemed to lose faith that someday a book would actually appear. My
former students Sharon Kehl-Califano, Sally Hirsh-Dickinson, and Jason Williams
enriched my graduate seminars and taught me much.
And warm appreciation goes as well to the later chairs of my...

Introduction

...well-known
trademark of one of New York’s most prestigious stores, it is more than
likely that we are looking at a portrait, not just of a fashionable woman, but also
of her fashionable purchase: a Christmas gift from Tiffany’s. By 1893 Tiffany’s
blue box was nationally recognized. First introduced in 1837, the store’s packaging
was trademarked and the color’s formula carefully-guarded. The box soon...

1. Raising Virtuous Shoppers

...capitalism whose seductive appeal continually threatens to alienate them from
the more wholesome pleasures of home and family. However, as close attention
to key passages in the novel will show, Mr. and Mrs. March fight these influences
by helping their daughters recognize the true sources of personal identity and
fulfillment: in other words, by teaching them how to shop for happiness...

2. Lily Bart and the Pursuit of Happiness

...disavowed
identification with the earlier novel’s characters as well as her preoccupation
with its thematic concerns. Like Alcott, Wharton seems to frame her heroine
Lily Bart’s developmental story with a concern for Protestant authenticity,
Anglo-American purity, and the moral development of national womanhood. In...

3. Lily at the Crossroads

...turns the conversation to his newly acquired inheritance. Here we get see how
adroit she is at psychological manipulation: “Most timidities have such secret
compensations, and Miss Bart was discerning enough to know that the inner
vanity is generally in proportion to the outer self-deprecation. With a more confident
person she would not have dared to dwell so long on one topic, or to show...

4. Smart Jews and Failed Protestants

...appeals to less admirable aspects of Lily’s character: her selfish narcissism
and her materialistic desires. And if Selden typifies the old Protestant bohemian
individualism,
with its fastidious judgments and disdain for materialism,
Rosedale represents a new materialistic “cleverness” that is defined here as specifically
Jewish. Critics have often noted the apparent antisemitism of Wharton’s...

5. Lily in the Valley of the Shadow

...distress increases.
And then there is another factor: Lily’s pride. As these tensions build in book
2, the narrator refers more and more to Lily’s pride as a motivation. In fact, her
felt need to repay Gus Trenor, the need that drives the novel’s plot, is attributed
to her pride. However, given that pride is hardly a virtue in traditional Christian...

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